I used to work for Graham Glass in late 2001 — but only for about three months. I was struck with one of his statements in my interview whereby he said code should be a work of art — it should be elegant.
I agreed then and I agree now.
Unfortunately, back in that time period, my mind was fairly scattered with a few other issues and I just wasn’t performing as I should have been. I had been through three companies within the past two years and had my confidence badly shaken. But that’s not what this post is about.
He would review my code and among the many changes and suggestions he would make, he would point out extra spaces or blank lines. I hadn’t realized that I was so inconsistent and basically careless. I learned and that stuck with me.
Now my code looks purposeful and consistent. EVERYTHING is thought out. Its a house with all its dishes put up (unlike mine currently). Its a house with books in shelves and not lying idly on a counter (unlike mine currently). Anyway, you get the point.
And so now I’ve gone native.
I now don’t really understand why everyone isn’t like that. As much time as we spend coding, we should all have our simple coding patterns under control. When I review code these days, I judge people based upon these little things. I don’t know if its quite fair, but if code is inconsistent, it rubs me completely the wrong way. It makes me question focus and one’s passion for their work.
In a recent experience, we had an “external” take on a project of moderate complexity that was pretty self-contained. We let him riff for weeks on end, but took no incremental checkpoints. Bad idea, by the way. And I take the blame for believing I was too busy to look in on the code. Anyway, when I finally checked it out, it was complete stream-of-consciousness programming! It was Jacob’s Ladder meets Vanilla Sky. It was as if he drunken-dialed in over the VPN!
The least offensive items were unused imports, parameters, and variables. Though I call those pretty offensive these days since our IDEs point those out for you these days. But beyond that, the logic was unbelievably scattered. Methods were long. Snippets of code were out of order. Exceptions were being eaten. I could go on.
So what did I do? I elbowed him off the project. That’s a weakness of mine. As Steve Macquire says in “Debugging the Development Process”, I flipped the bozo bit on him. And unfortunately, I’m complaining a lot because I’m now doing the development work that we’ve already paid for and are now late on.
My code? Well, of course, it reads like “The Da Vinci Code”. Well, perhaps maybe a little less intriguing…
While I enjoyed the DaVinci code, I sure hope your code doesn’t look like Dan Brown’s prose, because his prose struck me as artless. My code, of course, reads like “Deliverance” (no, really, it’s a great book).